Riverbed SteelCentral AppInternals Review

It provides automated dynamic discovery of applications and mapping of transaction flows.

Improvements to My Organization

We spend less time determining the root cause of problems. It became easy to find out responsible groups for problems. We can discover performance problems on pre-production environments before delivering in production. This way, we can increase customer satisfaction.

Valuable Features

Acceptable overhead on application

100% transactions not sampling

Clicks to root cause - fast & easy to diagnose and deep-dive

Automated dynamic discovery of applications and mapping of transaction flows

Room for Improvement

We'd like to be able to find out performance problems on application class and methods.

Stability Issues

SQL performance problems: fast SQL execution but slow reading of the database. We solved these issues by increasing the fetch size in the code.

Network problems: slow internet access by customers. There were CPU problems that couldn't be discovered by our Network Team.

Backup problems: performance problems because of other systems which caused slow performance of this system.

Database problems: performance problems between the database and storage but it told us it was an issue with the application.

We had issues with the end-to-end view of unique customer: reviewing end- to-end customer problems to see where a problem is about customer, code, DB or network.

Scalability Issues

There have been no issues scaling it for our needs.

Customer Service and Technical Support

Support for issues when we need it is very good and professional in Turkey.

Previous Solutions

We used HP Diagnostics, Wily and Introscope Agent. All these couldn't help diagnose problems on our network or with applications. Also, they use sample data.

Initial Setup

It's a bit complex to install and configure.

Implementation Team

We implemented it through a vendor team. The vendor has great experience which helps to make it a success.

Other Solutions Considered

We did a PoC for AppDynamics, Dynatrace and Riverbed OPNET. Riverbed OPNET was more successful on technical support, better problem troubleshooting, and end-user monitoring.

Other Advice

If you want to save time for problem resolution, and to address problem on your environments you should try Riverbed OPNET.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.